to the nobility that the first step toward Italian independence consists in the complete emancipation of the peasantry and in the transformation of the sharecropping system of rent into free bourgeois property. Mazzini, it seems, believes that a loan of ten million francs has more revolutionary significance than winning over to one's side tens of millions of people. I greatly fear that at a critical moment the Austrian government itself will alter the form of land tenure in Italy and carry through a reform "in the Galician manner"" (pp. 58-59)

"As for me, I cannot claim the merit of having discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Bourgeois historians long before me set forth the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists set forth the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove the following: 1) that the existence of classes is bound up only with certain historical phases of the development of production; 2) that class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself constitutes only a TRANSITION TO THE ABOLITION of all CLASSES and to a classless society *. Ignorant blockheads like Heinzen, who deny not only the struggle but the very existence of classes, thereby prove only that they, despite all their bloodthirsty and supposedly philanthropic wailing, regard the social conditions upon which bourgeois domination rests as the final product, the extreme limit of history, prove that they are merely servants of the bourgeoisie. And this servility is all the more repugnant the less these dunces understand also the grandeur and the transitory necessity of the bourgeois order itself" (pp. 164-165)

* See V. I. Lenin. Works, 4th ed., vol. 25, p. 383. Editor.

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consequently, on the position which the International Association ought to occupy with respect to the Irish question. I shall set forth here briefly the main points.

Ireland is the stronghold of English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of this country serves not only as the chief source of its material wealth. It constitutes its greatest moral force. The English aristocracy factually embodies the domination of England over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the most important instrument by means of which the English aristocracy maintains its domination within England itself.

On the other hand, if the English army and police were to leave Ireland tomorrow, an agrarian revolution would immediately commence there. But the fall of the English aristocracy in Ireland is conditioned by and has as its necessary consequence its fall in England. Thereby the preliminary conditions for a proletarian revolution in England would be created. Since in Ireland the land question is still the exclusive form of the social question, since it represents a question of existence, a question of life or death for the vast majority of the Irish people and at the same time is inseparable from the national question, then the destruction of the English landed aristocracy in Ireland is — infinitely easier an operation than in England itself, not to speak of the more passionate and more revolutionary character of the Irish in comparison with the English. As for the English bourgeoisie, first of all it is interested together with the English aristocracy in converting the whole of Ireland into one continuous pasture which would supply meat and wool to the English market at the cheapest possible prices. It is also in its interest to reduce the Irish population through the eviction of tenants from estates and forced emigration to such an insignificant number as would make it possible for English capital (rental capital) to function "securely" in this country. It is just as interested in the "clearing" of Irish estates as it was interested in the clearing of the rural areas of England

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